How We Check an Operator

The three evidence labels, and what each one means

checked means a register or an authority states it. On the dive pages that is Green Fins, and the membership level carries the assessment with it.

claimed means the operator states it, and the source line says where we read the claim: their own website, their agency profile, or a reply to an email. It is evidence of what they claim, not evidence that it is true. That distinction is the whole reason this directory exists.

not checked means we could not check it, and we print the gap rather than drop the field. A directory that shows only what it managed to find looks complete and is not.

A name we read is not yet a claim we publish

Reading agency names out of prose is easy to get wrong, and every way of getting it wrong produces a confident false statement about a named business. So a name found by machine is a candidate until somebody reads the sentence it came from. Until then the directory shows nothing for it, and the sentence is published beside the name once it is released, so you can judge our reading instead of taking it: except where we could not lift a whole sentence, and then the row says that instead of quoting a fragment. Six readings of 550 are in that state and they are described further down.

These are sentences we refused, each of which had put a training body next to a business that had not claimed it:

• A card accepted from a guest. “You must hold a certification from a recognised scuba diving society such as SSI, CMAS, BSAC, PADI or similar” is a condition on you, not a statement about the school.
• A body the school has left. “After years as a PADI 5 Star Dive Center, we transitioned to SSI” names PADI in the sentence explaining that it moved on.
• A recruitment advert. One liveaboard's dive-instructor vacancy listed eight bodies a new hire might hold. None of them was a claim about the boat.
• A review by a customer. “I had a wonderful experience doing my PADI open water training” is a guest speaking, on the school's own page.
• A recommendation of somebody else. “We recommend you visit your local PADI or SSI dive store” points at a shop that is not this one.
• An article comparing the bodies. Explaining what PADI and SSI are is not claiming either.
• The body's own website. Where a register publishes only a center's profile page on the training body's site, reading it reads the body. It came back with the body's marketing copy, and on one record with a sentence about dive sites on the other side of the world.

Where a state license stands behind a business rather than a membership, it is a different kind of evidence and we treat it that way: what an RNAAT licence proves sets out what Portugal's register settles and what it leaves open.

Where the best text on a page is a heading, a menu or a price row, the row says so rather than dressing it up as a quotation, and where the sentence is about the instructors rather than the school, it says that too: these bodies certify people and affiliate businesses separately. There is a third case, added on 27 August 2026: where what we hold begins in the middle of a sentence, the row says that and quotes nothing. Six of 550 readings are in that state. They were stored on the day we fixed a fault that cut a sentence at an inline tag, and fixing the reader does not repair a quotation already taken; re-reading three of them returns the same fragment, because the fragment is all the page offers. Printing it as the school’s sentence would overstate how whole the quotation is, and the reading itself is kept and still stands behind the name. Where a reading was taken away, the record says which body and why, and the note stays on the page.

Three things worth knowing about the claimed fields

An agency named on an operator's own site is a claim, not a membership anyone let us look up. PADI, SSI and the rest publish no readable member list, so a logo on a website is the end of what we can see. A license number is more useful than a logo precisely because you can take it to the authority yourself, which is the only check that counts. Instructor languages are what the operation states, and teams change with the season, so a list from last winter is a different claim from one taken this month.

We start at the address the register carries. If an agency is named there, that is the reading. If it is not, we follow up to three links from that page, on the same site only, chosen because their address or their wording points at courses, certification, licenses or the team. A school that names PADI on its courses page and a photograph of a turtle on its front page is ordinary, and reading only the front page reported that school as naming none.

So the Agency column has three states, not two. A named agency is what we read, and it links to the page it appears on, so you can open it yourself. A dash means the name was not on any page we opened, and the tooltip says how many that was; that is not the same as not being held, because we do not read a whole website. no answer means the site refused our check or never answered, so nothing was read there and the column says so. Until 15 August 2026 the last two were drawn identically, and one guide went out saying that fifteen operators named no agency when one of them had simply never been read.

A website offered in German tells you a translator was hired once. It does not tell you who is on the boat.

What each Green Fins level means

These are the register's own definitions, quoted, because the difference between them is larger than the badges suggest.

A Certified Member "received an in-person assessment from a Green Fins assessor within the last 12 months" and is scored out of 330, where lower is better: Gold up to 50, Silver up to 150, Bronze up to 200.

A Digital Member self-evaluates, and "Digital Members do not have to pass a minimum requirement". The digital score runs on a separate scale to 10 and in the other direction, so the two scores cannot be compared. A location where every member is Digital has been assessed by nobody, and our pages for those places say so in the title.

Restricted is not an administrative state. "Operations that score 201 or higher are classed as Restricted Members and will need to be reassessed to receive membership benefits", and a restricted member "has either not yet reached the minimum threshold assessment score, has not managed to effectively reduce their assessment score within the last two years or has been involved in an activity that is seen as seriously detrimental to the marine environment".

The register does not say which of those three applies to any one operation, and neither do we. We show the label because hiding it would be worse, and we refuse to guess at the reason behind it.

What no register carries

Insurance. No public register of operator liability cover exists in the countries we cover, so any directory claiming to have checked it is quoting the operator back to you. Guide ratios and in-water practice. The Green Fins assessment covers environmental impact, not supervision. Instructor languages, where they are blank. A blank means no answer yet, not that nobody there speaks your language.

Which bodies publish a list anyone can read, which do not, and what each one returned when it was asked, is set out in which registers can be read. Nine of twenty-five answer, and four of the seventy-four lists here rest on none of them.

The whole directory as one file

Everything on these pages is also published as a single machine-readable file: directory-index.json. It carries every place and every operator with its town, country, published languages and evidence level, and it is regenerated whenever the directory is rebuilt, so it cannot drift from what you see.

It exists because a directory that asks you to trust its evidence should let you check the evidence in bulk rather than page by page. Use it, quote it, or run your own comparison against it. If you do something interesting with it we would like to hear about it.

Corrections, and how to request one

If you operate one of these businesses and a field is wrong, write to us with the document and we will correct it and date the correction. We will not remove a factual register entry on request, and we do not accept payment for a listing, an ordering or a badge. If that ever changes it will be declared here and on the disclosure page before the first paid listing appears.